This invention has relation to an attachment which can be readily fastened to a bucket on a front end loader to provide a pair of tines so that the combination can perform as a pallet loader or a fork lift truck or the like.
A typical front end loader is provided with a bucket or scoop shovel adapted for loading various types of farm materials, for example. Often there is a need for an implement to lift pallets, bales, or the like, which require forwardly extending parallel tines such as found on the typical fork lift truck. The need for the scoop shovel attachment in a farm environment, for example, is much greater, or at least, much more frequent that the need for the fork lift or pallet loader tines, in a typical situation. Therefore, in such situations it is typically economically impossible or at least unsound to have on hand a vehicle dedicated primarily to use as a pallet loader or fork lift truck. Instead, a need exists for apparatus which will rapidly allow the scoop shovel or loader bucket of a front end loader to be converted for use as a pallet loader. This conversion should occasion a minimum of down time, should be easily reversible to convert back to loader bucket use, should not necessitate permanent attachments or fixtures on the loader bucket which can be damaged or fouled with loaded materials during loader bucket use, and should be usable on a wide range of sizes and shapes of buckets.
Prior art attempts have been made to provide such structures. The patent to Trissler, U.S. Pat. No. 2,500,887, granted in March of 1950, shows a tractor blade fork consisting of two fork lift arms or limbs 9 which are simply hooked over the top of the bulldozer blade. The patent to Brock, U.S. Pat. No. 2,473,505, granted in June of 1949, shows a pair of lifting tines 40 which can be attached and detached from bulldozer blades, but which require elaborate built-in modifications of the bulldozer blades. These tines are of no value as far as being attachable to any scoop shovel or blade which is not modified to receive them.
Fork lift loader attachments which are more or less permanently attached to bulldozer blades, scoop shovels or the like, include the patent to Knutson, U.S. Pat. No. 3,075,661, granted in Jan. of 1963; the patent to Bronson, U.S. Pat. No. 3,795,070, granted in March of 1974; the patent to Olson, U.S. Pat. No. 3,975,844, granted in August of 1976; and the patent to Felstet, U.S. Pat. No. 4,038,766, granted in August of 1977. They are not believed particularly pertinent in the present invention.
Patents which show fork lift attachments which can be utilized on a front end loader only after the bucket is removed are the patent to Barth, U.S. Pat. No. 3,966,070 granted in June of 1976; and the patent to Paluck, U.S. Pat. No. 2,860,794 granted in September of 1956.
A patent which includes a pair of permanently mounted brackets along the top of a loader bucket for the reception of fork members is the patent to Vandewater, U.S. Pat. No. 3,921,837, granted in November of 1975.
The patent to Cooper, U.S. Pat. No. 3,866,342, granted in February of 1975, shows the use of chains to hook a large pivotally mounted snowplow attachment to a front end loader bucket to be lifted by it.
None of the structures shown in any of these patents or any combination of these structures anticipates the simple structure of the present invention which will allow fork lift tines to be firmly and fixedly attached to loader buckets of virtually any shape to convert the front end loader to use as a pallet loader or fork lift truck; and which can be substantially instantaneously removed from that bucket to leave the bucket entirely unemcumbered of any apparatus related to its pallet loader use.
The patents referred to above were located in a search of the prior art. Applicant and those in privity to him know of no closer prior art than that set out above; and they know of no prior art which anticipates the claims made in this application.